The present invention relates to correlation techniques and more particularly to a method of obtaining correlation between an input-signal pulse-sequence and a reference-signal pulse-sequence by resort to comparison-correlation of sampled and digitally coded pulse sequence representations, thereby providing detection of a particular class of input pulse sequences.
In general, prior types of programmable correlation apparatus give equal attention to all pulse positions or utilize costly techniques to ignore pulse-positions whose information content is considered irrelevant. In many instances it is desirable to direct the correlation process to only pulse positions of concern, ignoring irrelevant pulse positions.